ENDANGERED COCKTAIL OF THE MONTH-THE FANCIULLI COCKTAIL

By Pink Lady
In keeping with the theme of drinking for those who can’t this month (I support your Dry January, though!), I recommend raising a Fanciulli Cocktail. This drink is similar to a Manhattan, but deploys a bit of Fernet-Branca, making it a bit darker, spicier, and perhaps more serious, much like the vibes in January after a decadent December.

This is a drink I actually thought I created back when I worked for Fernet-Branca, or at least thought was created by one of my tattooed, Fernet-Branca-loving bartender friends. But Philip Greene’s excellent book The Manhattan: The Story of the First Modern Cocktail offers a history that dates back much further than Boston circa 2014.

Francesco Fanciulli was once the director for the U.S. Marine Band, a position he filled in 1892 after “The March King” John Philip Sousa requested a discharge to pursue a promising career as a civilian bandleader. You know Sousa’s work from high school band class and his famous patriotic bangers, such as Stars & Stripes Forever. In 1897, Fanciulli got into it during a Memorial Day concert with Lt. T. L. Draper “concerning the character of the music furnished,” according to a WASHINGTON EVENING STAR item on the events of the day. Lt. Draper had requested that Fanciulli play one of Sousa’s hotter jams, El Capitan, a march that ‘had some swing to it.’ When Fanciulli refused, Lt. Draper pulled rank, ordering him back to the Marine barracks and under arrest. Fanciulli was court martialed and convicted, but the verdict would be overturned on appeal by Theodore Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the Navy.

Fanciulli went on to have a civilian career, but as for whether this drink was a toast to him, or it was he who mixed it up in the first place, who knows? The recipe first appears in print in Albert Stevens Crockett’s 1931 Old Waldorf Bar Days along with a recipe note that links it to a Puccini opera (Fanciulla del West), which Crockett then debunks. Crockett notes that “Fanciulli is what they say when they mean ‘the boys’ on the banks of the Tiber; also in the environs of Vesuvius”, so maybe it’s a toast to the proverbial boys? Today, Google translates “fanciulli” to “the children”, so I say we raise a glass to those of us who are young at heart.

FANCIULLI
COCKTAIL

2 OUNCES of bourbon
1 OUNCE of sweet vermouth
1/4 OUNCE of Fernet-Branca

STIR ingredients with ice.
STRAIN into a chilled vintage cocktail glass.
GARNISH with a lemon peel.

Cin-cin!